


Paints

by Piper_Emerald



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Art AU, Artist Connor Murphy (Dear Evan Hansen), Connor Murphy week, M/M, Painting, Symbolism, more alluded to if anything, okay it's not a lot of tree bros
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-05-15 09:14:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14787699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Piper_Emerald/pseuds/Piper_Emerald
Summary: Connor was fourteen when he realized that paints were more expressive than language.





	Paints

**Author's Note:**

> For Day 2 of Connor Murphy Week

Connor was fourteen when he realized that paints were more expressive than language. Words were deceitful, they could convince you of one thing while sneaking another more dangerous message down your throat. They could hurl themselves at the people he loved and place the weapon in his hands. Words only caused pain and lost the trust of the people he fought to keep with him. Paints were different.

Growing up, art class had always been his favorite subject, but that was just because the art teachers seemed to hate him a little bit less than all of the other adults. He didn’t used art as an escape, it was just a quick breath of air in the suffocation that was school. The drawing and sculptures he made were tossed aside at the end of the year. Then, something changed.

He remembered the day. The air around him felt like water. It was pressing into him, turning his body into a crumpled and battered mess, but no one around was going to throw him a lifeline. He was drowning and everyone else was floating effortlessly. They navigated life so flawlessly and he didn’t understand how. He never understood and it hurt. 

It hurt and he hated it. He fucking hated it.

He got to class late, but his art teacher didn’t take attendance. Most of his peers like to skip this class, as long as they got most of the assignments in they didn’t get in trouble. The only reason Connor had forced himself through the door and not found a quiet corner of the school to brood in instead was because he knew he wasn’t going to have to deal with the shrill voices of the stupid kids in his grade.

They were supposed to be painting a vase that sat in the front of the studio. Connor had a blank paper pinned to his isle and a palate of nauseatingly bright colors in front of him. He hadn’t planned to touch either, but for some reason his shaking hands had grasped one of the brushes. 

He started with yellow. First it looked like someone had crushed a sunflower and smeared it across his paper. It was ugly and damaged and gross. He didn’t like it. Looking at it made him sick. 

So he added red. On the brush it had looked like blood. That was familiar. It reminded him of sitting alone in a bathroom pretending he wasn’t waiting for someone to find him. No one was going to find him. He was alone and broken and red and that couldn’t be soothed out by even the coolest and calmest of blues. 

The colors mixed together and formed something brighter. They melted into a hot and dangerous fire. It burned like anger but smoldered like weakness. It was Connor. It was the pain of every stare, every whisper, every shred of disappointment. It showed what a mirror never could, it told what his voice refused to. He was on the paper and he felt a little bit lighter.

He didn’t turn in his painting at the end of class. Instead he rolled it up and stuck it in his bag. It wasn’t right for other people to see it. That would feel like a betrayal. It was his fire and his only. Every brushstroke was secret. 

For months Connor didn’t know what to do with the rubber-banded scroll. At first he stowed it under his bed, but that didn’t feel right. He was smothering it. He was leaving it alone in a shallow but dark hole.

The second problem was easier to fix than the first. The next week Connor dipped his paint into a light pink. It swirled smoothly onto the paper, making loops and curves that even his hand couldn’t anticipate. It beckoned other colors. A bright green joined with freedom and a deep indigo silently complimented. Together they formed a symphony, harmonizing gloriously. 

At the end of class Connor looked at an image that should be happy. It should light up an entire room with it’s beauty but a sadness lingered in—a sadness and a fear. Connor had put that fear there.

This picture joined the first under his bed. They lived together even though he knew that they weren’t meant to coexist peacefully. One would suck the life out of the other, he just wasn’t sure which yet. 

There were more painting after this. Each class took him on a different journey and left him feeling a little less beaten by the world. He was still carrying his weight alone, but at least now he had a moment to rest.

A small snatch of air had turned into the ability to breathe. The water was still all around him, and there were still hundreds of people who did not want to teach him how to float, but at least he wasn’t sunk. Not just yet.

When his freshman year ended and took his art class with it, Connor realized that he needed to fight for his outlet. His parents stopped giving him allowances a long time ago, but his mother didn’t seem to realize the twenties that disappeared from her purse. Or maybe she did. Maybe she assumed he was buying weed or alcohol and instead of stopping him she was sitting alone and feeling bad. Because that was all she ever did, really. She felt bad, and she tried to talk to him, but there was never any action. 

It was just sorrow and disappointment. His mother’s sadness curled around Connor in thin purples strings. They bled onto the paper, but bleeding was all they could ever do. They weren’t strong enough. They were bogged down with the water of the world and they created something Connor didn’t fit into. They didn’t remember the shape of him enough to leave room.

The papers stayed under his bed until the summer before his senior year. It started with a fight. It started as his fault. Everything was always his fault because he couldn’t just be nice. He couldn’t just be happy like the rest of his family and all of their friends. He couldn’t just make friends of his own, as if finding accepting people was easy, as if his parents and Zoe weren’t already fully aware that all the people around him ever saw him as was a freak.

He exploded at his sister. Waves of red and orange burnt through the pink and indigo. They lashed out and tried to cause as much pain as they could because that was really all he was good at wasn’t it. He was the monster and the least he could do was be consistent about it.

His mother had tried to step in, but it was his father that silenced him. Neither of his parents had ever really yelled at him. They’d been mad and frustrated before, but they’d never let him break them. 

His father’s voice wasn’t the booming and blaring red that he thought it would be. It wasn’t the stifled and hurt purple of his mother or the saddened pink of his sister. There was no color in his father’s anger. It was devoid of that. The whites and blacks of exactly how the situation had to be looked at drowned everything out. 

Because that should be right. Connor was the one who was trying to hurt them. He always was. His family shouldn’t have to look for color when there wasn’t any, like everything else that was just in Connor’s head.

He stormed off to his room after that. He slammed the door and locked it. He knew his parents would try to let him cool down and that was what he wanted. 

Connor stuffed three years worth of paintings into his backpack and opened his window. He didn’t think that his family realized the error in their judgement until his car was already skidding out of the driveway.

In movies this moment always happened at night fall. Darkness always loomed over in shades of navy blue. It masked actions and hid intent. The day was bright when Connor stumbled into the park. It had been closed for five hours. He knew that no one was there. It worked as well as any other place. 

Connor hiked as far as he could before his legs threatened to give out. He found a cluster of trees and dropped his bag into the ground. He pulled out the first picture he’d ever made. The fire was still smoldering, it was still hot and it was never going too cool down. It wasn’t capable of that. He stapled it to the tree in front of him.

The next was the pink painting. He had still failed that one. It went on the tree next to the first. Connor kept going until all of his works were surrounding him. His life and every broken piece of it formed a ring around him.

It didn’t give him air anymore. These weren’t mirrors, they weren’t expression, they were screams. They were him calling out for help and knowing that no one was coming. No one was ever coming at it hurt. His lungs were full and he just wanted the agony to stop. 

He kept a lighter in his jacket pocket. At first it was because he knew it was against school rules. Then it was for when he had the chance to inhale a joint. Then just habit.

His mind hadn’t caught up to his shaking hands when he pulled it out a lit it. The flame didn’t look like the one he’d made. Real things never look like how we incarnate them. In a trance, he raised it to the fake fire. He watched them dance together, but only one lived. The other was only ever meant to be ash. 

It was the heat that brought him to his senses. Before his eyes every piece of his life he’d brought into the world was burning. The painting and paper were melting into nothing. And they were going to take him with them. 

Connor stumbled, then he tripped. He wanted to run. He wanted to scream because this wasn’t how he was going to die. He’d thought about it so many times but now he realized he wanted more. He wasn’t so much more. But he couldn’t move. He was trapped in a cage he’d created and he didn’t have the key. Someone else did. Someone else had to save him, but everyone knew that Connor wasn’t worth saving. 

He closed his eyes. Everything was hot and bright and he couldn’t breath again. This was worse than drowning, it was so much worse.

Then something was hauling him to his feet. He look up to see a boy with blonde hair and brown eyes. He looked familiar but Connor couldn’t place him. The boy pulled Connor away from the fire. He was saying something that Connor couldn’t hear. Everything was a blur to Connor, the world was fading and melting, and the only thing he could decipher was a soft light blue.

The fire department got there a minute later. Connor didn’t know how they’d been able to arrive so quickly. He was lucky they had. He was lucky the fire hadn’t spread beyond his cluster of trees. 

He sat next to the boy who had saved his life. An ambulance was coming for them. The firemen had said something about smoke inhalation. They had also asked how the fire was started. Connor didn’t know how to answer. He wanted to cry and knew how completely pathetic that would make him.

“I don’t know,” the boy uttered before he could say anything. “We were hiking and saw the smoke. I work here, I was showing him around.”

Connor was speechless. He looked at the boy for some sort of answer but didn’t received any until the fireman had walked away.

“You’re Connor Murphy, right?” The boy asked in a soft voice.

“Yes,” Connor uttered.

“I’m Evan,” the boy told him. “We go to school together.”

“Oh,” was all Connor could say because what the hell was going on right now.

“I’m sorry,” Evan stammered. “I just…were the paintings your’s?”

“You saw that,” Connor felt numb.

“Some of it,” Evan admitted. 

“You lied to that man,” Connor needed to know why. He needed to know why some kid he’d never spoken to was defending him.

“You’d be arrested for arson,” Evan said as if it was an answer. 

“I don’t need protection,” Connor informed him defensively. 

“I’m sorry,” Evan shrunk in on himself a little bit. Connor felt a pang of regret.

“The park’s closed, what are you even doing here?” Connor asked him.

“The same thing as you,” Evan’s voice was even smaller now. He wasn’t looking at Connor.

“You’re here to burn a bunch of paintings?” Connor scoffed.

“No.”

“Oh,” it took a second for Connor to get it. “Shit.”

“Yeah,” Evan inhaled sharply.

“So why save me?” He asked.

“I don’t know,” Evan sighed. “I really don’t.”

The light blue wrapped around the both of them. It diluted the red, putting an end to the fire that Connor knew would find a way to relight itself. That didn’t really matter right now. The fire would always be there. He had always understood that. The only difference was now he knew he didn’t want it to swallow him.

“I’m going to tell them the truth,” Connor looked at the firemen. “I think you should too.”

“I don’t think mine relates,” Evan told him.

“No,” Connor agreed. “But you need to tell someone. You need help. So do I.”

Evan nodded. The light blue wasn’t peaceful, but it wanted to be. Connor wanted it to be to. He wanted to paint it. Maybe instead of trapping parts of himself on paper, he could let in something else. Maybe he could breathe without burning.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow my Tumblr @piperemerald


End file.
